Blu-ray Releases: July 12, 2011

12. Jul, 2011

Things really couldn’t get much worse than what we experienced last week. The pickins were slim and the outlook was bleak. Thankfully, the Blu-ray gods have decided to show some mercy on us all. At the very least, it’s a reprieve from the torture we had to endure.

Here are some of the releases for Tuesday, July 12, 2011:

The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)

Insidious (2010)

Entourage: The Complete Seventh Season (2010)

Brazil (1985)

Robot Chicken: Star Wars 3 (2010)

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

Damnation Alley (1977)

Naked (1993)

B.B King Live (2011)

Megadeth: That One Night (2005)

Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010)

Brother’s Justice (2010)

2012: Ice Age (2011)

Rango (2011) **Releases on Friday July 15th**

Arthur (2011) **Releases on Friday July 15th**

At first glance I wouldn’t have expected making a selection this week to be all that difficult. Then it hit me. There are actually a fair amount of better-than-average choices available.

My initial thought was to open my wallet up to some Robot Chicken love. Always good for a laugh this latest release should have been a done deal but further perusal of the other titles and things got interesting. Take for example the earlier works of Terry Gilliam in 1985’s Brazil. Watching a movie like Brazil leaves no question that Gilliam was once associated with the genius that was Monty Python. But still, even that temptation wasn’t enough for me to sign on the proverbial dotted line and seal the deal this week.

As strange as it may sound, my pick this week would have to be with Roger Corman’s ever-so-campy Battle Beyond the Stars. There’s just something about that movie that instantly transports me to my youth – to a time when sci-fi (campy or otherwise) was king and I could never get enough of it. Maybe it was the casting? With the likes of Robert Vaughn, John Saxon and George Peppard how could you go wrong. Then again those set pieces, costumes and dairy-induced special effects were nearly perfect and remind me of another sci-fi favorite from 1980 – Flash Gordon.

Nope . . . I figured it out. I know why – now that I’ve seen the box art – I can’t get this movie out of my head. It’s that damn silver-dollar-sized wart of lead actor Richard Thomas. How he made the transition from John-boy Walton to star-hopping Shad I’ll never know.

But wait, I think I tapped even further into my subconscious and truly understand why I gravitate to this movie. Read the following description of Battle Beyond the Stars taken from Blu-ray.com:

Shad must scour the cosmos to recruit mercenaries from different planets and cultures, in order to save his peaceful home planet from the threat of the evil tyrant Sador, bent on dominating and enslaving the entire universe. Joining this “magnificant seven” of mercenaries are the deadly Gelt, carefree Cowboy, and the sexy Valkyrie Saint-Exmin.

Seeing as how you’re reading this Blu-ray update on an actual videogame website I would hope this movie synopses rings a number of immediate bells with our readers. Who’ll be the first reader to name that game?